In the past week, two suicides have rocked my community and my facebook newsfeed. First, a local mother, Jennifer Huston, went missing. When they found her they ruled her death a suicide. Not long after, Robin Williams shocked the world with his death as well.

In all the discussions I’ve seen, something has been bothering me. I wasn’t able to put my finger on it until now.

By now you’ve seen the headlines. “Unless You Have Celiac Disease Gluten Sensitivity is Probably Just in Your Head” from PBS and “Researchers Who Provided Key Evidence For Gluten Sensitivity Have Thoroughly Shown That It Doesn’t Exist” from Business Insider were two of the most sensational and most-shared on my facebook feed.

So, is there no such thing as gluten sensitivity after all? Are all of us gluten-free non-celiacs just a bunch of hypochondriacs?

I imagine this is the one you’ve been waiting for. The idea that just eating a certain way for a while will totally heal our guts and brains, making us stable and happy forever and ever is a tantalizing thought.

That dream of an end result is not where I’m at (yet?). It may never be where I end up. But in the meantime, the progress toward healing my gut & rebalancing gut flora with diet has made a big difference in the way my bipolar disorder plays out. Slowly, research is emerging that corroborates this connection.

Stock and broth are ridiculously easy to make yourself. Stock and broth are healing foods, full of health benefits for the gut, your joints, and your whole body. They also form the foundation for soups, and add flavor to just about any savory dish.

You can make your stock in a stainless steel stock pot or a slow cooker. We choose based on what meals are coming up. I prefer to make it in the stock pot, because our big one holds 16 quarts, while our biggest crock pot holds a little under 8 quarts. If you are concerned about … Continue reading Chicken Broth & Stock

Some of that is due to the fact that our picky eater started eating, and both the kids are teens now. Some of that is we have less time to shop and plan, so we’re not getting some of the deals we used to get. But a big part of it is that grains and starches are cheap, while high quality, organic meats, fruits, and vegetables are not.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy real food, which is pretty much the same thing. Find out how we handled tripling our budget for the best food money can buy! One of the biggest challenges of real food is the sticker shock. $15/gallon for milk? $7/dozen for eggs? $8/lb for ground beef? It’s enough to send most budget-conscious people running back to the bread isle and factory farmed meat. Don’t compare what you spend on real food to what someone else spends on the cheapest SAD poison they can find! Instead, recalibrate your sense of what food really costs, and cut back in other areas. … Continue reading The Big Lie: Money Can’t Buy…

The other day I suddenly decided I wanted a black forest cake. But since we really don’t need a whole cake for the four of us and two of us aren’t even that big on chocolate, I decided to do cupcakes instead.

Black Forest Cupcake

I adapted a recipe from Against All Grain. Hers are a lot prettier than mine, which wasn’t helped by the bad lighting. Ours were good to eat, though!

Preparing the Basics

Recipes

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